Oil rose

West Texas Intermediate rose after a government report showed that inventories at Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for the contract, dropped a seventh week. Brent oil slid.

WTI rose as much as 0.7 percent. Supplies at Cushing fell 989,000 barrels to 29.8 million last week, the lowest level since January 2012, the Energy Information Administration said. Futures also climbed after Enterprise Products Partners LP said yesterday that operations on the expanded Seaway line to Houston from Cushing will begin as early as May. Brent slipped as much as 0.9 percent, narrowing the spread between the two grades.

WTI for April delivery advanced 58 cents, or 0.6 percent, to $100.28 a barrel at 10:43 a.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract traded at $100.23 before the release of the report at 10:30 a.m. in Washington. The volume of all futures traded was 47 percent higher than the 100-day average for the time of day.

Brent for May settlement dropped 68 cents, or 0.6 percent, to $106.11 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. Trading volume was 13 percent lower than the 100-day average. The European benchmark’s premium to WTI for the same month slipped to $7.04 a barrel.

Cushing stockpiles have fallen since the southern portion of the Keystone XL pipeline began moving oil to the Texas Gulf Coast from Cushing in January.

Enterprise is looping the existing Seaway line with a parallel pipe that will increase capacity to the Houston area to 850,000 barrels a day. The twinned line is expected to be in service in late May or early June, Bill Ordemann, a senior vice president for Enterprise, said in a presentation to analysts in Houston yesterday.

Total crude inventories climbed by 5.85 million barrels to 375.9 million, the EIA said. A 2.75 million-barrel gain was projected, according to the median of 11 analyst responses in a Bloomberg survey.

U.S. crude production increased 33,000 barrels a day to 8.22 million, the EIA said. It was at the highest level since 1988 as output surged on a combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which has unlocked supplies trapped in shale formations.

Supplies of distillate fuel, a category that includes heating oil and diesel, fell 3.1 million barrels last week to 110.8 million, the lowest level since May 2008, according to the EIA, the Energy Department’s statistical arm. Gasoline stockpiles dropped 1.47 million barrels to 222.3 million.